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One of the highlight of last year’s Stony Brook conference was John Milnor’s talk about John Nash. The video is now available online. John Milnor, also an Abel Prize laureate, is familiar to many economists from his book “Topology from the differential approach”. He has known John Nash from the beginning of their careers in the common room in the math school at Princeton University. Watch him talk with clarity and humor about young Nash’s ambitions, creativity, courage, and contributions.
Here is a the handwritten letter which Nash wrote to the NSA in 1955 (pdf), fifteen years before Cook formalized the P/NP problem. In the letter Nash conjectures that for most encryption mechanisms, recovering the key from the cipher requires exponential amount of time. And here is what Nash had to say about proving this conjecture: